One of the greatest unexpected pleasures of writing this chronological film blog has been experiencing short format motion pictures. Shorts run the gamut of picture making from avant-garde to zoological documentary not to mention everything in-between. They remind us that movies are more than the feature releases of Hollywood and the national cinemas, that documentaries are more than motion pictures accompanied by narrative truth claims, and that experimental cinema is not just a convenient umbrella term for anything not given a commercial release. In 1957, Francis Thompson completed a fifteen minute abstract documentary titled N.Y. N.Y. (1957). It is at once an experimental film and a documentary, and it just may be my favorite short subject film. In the picture, Thompson used prisms, mirrors, lenses, and who knows what else to transform actuality footage of New York City into a personal impressionistic view of a day in the life of Gotham. This is the city as seen by one who finds it joyful, vibrant, comical, and always surreal. This is the city as one who loves it and lives in it might explain it to someone who has never experienced it--or even to one who has experienced it but never realized the magic of the world all around. Few things reveal or reminds us of the beauty of everyday things as seeing them in new ways. Filmmakers like Thompson offer us the chance to do just that.

Thomspon's picture features the kind of playful cinematic whimsy we often see in animated shorts. Pedestrians are compressed into double-footed legs. Cars disappear when the light turns green (if only that were true). Steel girders gently float from the sky downward. Buildings look like they belong in a surreal landscape (see image above).

Gene Forrell composed a dynamic score that fuses symphonic music with everyday sound effects to underscore mood, and establish pacing and rhythm to the images. One of my favorite instances of Thompson and Forrell's cooperation is the visual sound of an alarm clock for the morning sequence of the film (see image above). It just screams: WAKE UP!

The short film received glowing reviews in the New York Times and earned awards in New York, Brussels, London, and Cannes. The Times review stated that Thompson was negotiating with United Artists for a 35 mm theatrical release but I've found no evidence that this ever happened.

Thompson trained as a painter, earning an art degree from the Carnegie institute in 1930. Soon after he was exposed to the artistic and documentary potential of cinema when he viewed the works of Eisenstein, Bunuel, Clair, Cocteau, Dali, Pudovkin and others while studying painting in Paris. Back in the United States, he made Evolution of a Skyscraper (1939) for the Museum of Modern Art before teaming up with filmmaker Julian Bryan to make documentaries for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the State Department among others. By the early 1950s he was in business for himself creating documentaries and working on N.Y., N.Y.

Thompson's agenda was to create an abstract documentary, a "moving modernistic painting" of New York. His training as a painter and his exposure to art cinema is evident in every frame of surreal buildings, cubist avenues, and impressionistic elevator rides. He revealed that he shot the footage around New York on Kodachrome color film using 16mm Eastman Cine Special and Arriflex cameras but took the exact techniques and tools used to create the amazing distorted images to the grave (Thompson died in 2003). Perhaps it's for the best that his methods remain a secret. For when we deconstruct a thing we tend to diminish its power and shatter its magic. Anyway, I'd hate to see his talent reduced to a "Thompson" plug-in for Final Cut.

With the exception of Godzilla (1954) my viewing history of movies made in Japan in the 1950s has thus far been restricted to the art and prestige pictures that established a new international reputation for Japanese cinema following World War II: Rashomon (1950), Gate of Hell (1953), Ugetsu (1953, my favorite), Tokyo Story (1953), Seven Samurai (1954), and The Burmese Harp (1956). So, when TCM broadcast Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit (1956) a few months ago I decided to give the film a look. I'm glad that I did. In a way, the reckless youth tragedy is more fun to watch, more titillating, and more in touch with its own social milieu than the great prestige pictures. And something about the experience of watching it almost makes me want to forget all about those more famous films from Japan and seek out other gems from the popular cinema.

Crazed Fruit is a tale of tragic love and revenge among mid-fifties university students that uses the tradition versus modern trope to explain the reckless behavior of its disaffected characters. Brothers Natsuhisa (Yujiro Ishihara) and Haruji (Masahiko Tsugawa) form two sides of a love triangle. They vie for the affections of Eri (Mie Kitahara), a three-timing young wife neglected by her older American husband. Haruji is inexperienced in the ways of love and life, and believes that he and Eri are beginning a romantic love affair. Eri is using him to recapture her own lost innocence and to "be who I was long ago." Meanwhile, the competitive and sexually jaded Natsuhisa extorts sex from her in return for keeping his mouth shut about her marriage and casual affairs. As we expect Haruji eventually discovers the truth about Eri and Natsuhisa. However, as we might not expect, he then hunts them down and exacts a terrible revenge in the middle of Tokyo Bay.

Nakahira breaks up the narrative flow with an extemporaneous dance number (was Godard watching?).

The brothers are part of a group of affluent students who spend their days complaining about boredom and seek to overcome it through excessive drinking, gambling, petty crimes, sexual competitions, mindless pleasure seeking, and the conspicuous consumption of material wealth. They sport crew cuts, dress in aloha shirts, drive around in sporty cars, and spend their days on the water cruising for girls. Dubbed the Sun Tribe after Ishihara's book, Season of the Sun they eschew the teachings of their professors, traditional ideas about morality, social responsibility, the work ethic, and capitalism as outdated and unexciting. They see the past as worthless and the future as hopeless. Their only concern is a giant boring void of the present that they seek to fill with mindless diversions. We can ask if they behave this way simply because they are somehow incapable of anything save the pursuit of the satisfaction of their physical desires or because after distancing themselves from traditional ways of living they simply have no ideas of their own beyond a fear of boredom, but director Nakahira isn't going to tell us. He's more concerned with their actions than their psychologies.

If Crazed Fruit has anything in common with last week's picture it is an easy dislocation of time through editing. Almost the entire story unfolds in flashback so Nakahira is not tied to the restrictions of conventional storytelling. Hence, the director displays some events as they're haphazardly recalled through quick cuts, unexpected edits that break the linear narrative, the glaring artifice of back projection, dialogue-free scenes that rely on facial expressions, matching close-ups in the dialogue scenes, and action scenes with unusual cutaways in an impressionistic style that lets us see not only what the action looks like but how it feels for the characters to take part in it. The result is a film experience that burns with as much brazen energy as its erratic characters. It's not exactly New Wave style but it feels as though we're being pulled in that direction. Musically, events float along on a snaky Swing and Hawaiian guitar infected score by Takemitsu Toru and Sato Masaru. This is the first time I've knowingly heard music from either one, and I plan to keep my ears open for more as the score is superb (anybody know of a soundtrack album?).

An unusual aerial shot and the elegant design painted on the water by Haru's craft belie the violence about to unfold at the conclusion of Crazed Fruit.

Nearly every time I see a motion picture adapted from a novel I wish I'd read the book first. Not only because when I experience them the other way 'round (reading the book after seeing the movie) I find the characters concretized as specific actors in my mind, but also because I like to see if I can figure out why a producer considered the book ideal to adapt to cinema. That said, even though I hadn't read Ishihara Shintaro's 1956 novel about depraved youth Crazed Fruit nor its award-winning predecessor Season of the Sun before watching this week's Film of the Year it's pretty clear why Nikkatsu studio produced them as part of a strategy to establish a new youth genre in the mid-fifties. According to information on the DVD Ishihara's popular tales of depraved rich young things in post-Occupation Japan sparked a cult following that reflected the style of the characters (and the author too). So, the studio was simply savvy enough to try and cash in on what looked to be a growing trend. Of course that leads me to question why the books and movies would be popular in 1950s Japan in the first place. The Criterion website sums up the movie as "an anarchic outcry against tradition and the older generation" but I think its popularity had as much to do with the economic realities at the beginning of a new era. Recall that the six years, eight months occupation by American forces extended the war experience for Japan until April 1952. The majority of the population had to overcome great social, economic, and personal changes and hardships through those years. The young, affluent, carefree characters in the movie happen to be carefree and affluent at a time when the vast majority of the country were not. 1956 may have been the year when Japan's Economic Planning Agency issued an Economic White Paper that declared that the post-war period of the economy was finally ended and the country's economic rise was about to truly begin, but according to a Time magazine article on the Sun Tribe some seventy-six percent of college seniors in Japan that year had no prospects for employment ("Japan: The Rising Sun Tribe," Time, 17 December 1956). If that staggering statistic is anywhere near accurate then this film displays still mostly imaginative frontiers of personal gratification. The popularity of the film, then, probably had less to do with breaking with tradition than the fact that these mostly unavailable pleasures appealed to the voyeurism of its young audiences. Besides, the quick pace, fresh style, young actors, and the naughty happenings are a lot of fun to watch.

One last thing: In some ways the screenplay reminds me of the old Warner Bros. gangster cycle. The history buff in me noted that if WWII and the Occupation had never been then this story would not have existed. Yet in the same way that prohibition and the Depression are left out of Little Caesar(1931) these events, which it can be argued changed society and culture in Japan more than any other factors in the century, are not included in this picture. The characters may have been too young to remember much about the social solidarity, regimentation, and state-enforced public morality of the war years (we caught glimpses of these in The Most Beautiful(1944) previously on this blog) but given their ages they would have grown up among the economic hardships suffered during the Occupation. Their repudiation of traditional ways in favor of more modern Westernized styles and their declaration to embrace an irresponsible way of living would be influenced by the great social changes that occurred in this period yet like the 1930s gangster pictures Ishihara's screenplay tells his tale from the perspective of the characters and excludes any scenes of past events influencing their behavior. Despite the constant presentations of moral depravity this approach prevents the film from becoming a juvenile delinquency-as-social problem picture like Blackboard Jungle (1955), and it also keeps the characters from being written off as merely dangerous, antisocial heavies instead of infantile anti-heroes. And also like the old gangster films, the screenplay actually affirms traditional ideas by showing that those who behave in such ways are ultimately destroyed through faults of character.

I'm re-reading my worn copy of David Halberstam's popular history The Fifties (1993). The author was a fine storyteller and his broad survey of major social, political, and cultural changes in the United States is a great way to get back in the groove of thinking about that decade (though I don't recall too much depth of information about motion pictures beyond the cultural influences of Brando and Dean). However, I was surprised to find a connection with yesterday's post when I re-read the very first line of the preface:

The fifties were captured in black and white, most often by still photographers; by contrast the decade that followed was, more often than not, caught in living color on tape or film. Not surprisingly, in retrospect the pace of the fifties seemed slower, almost languid. Social ferment, however, was beginning just beneath this placid surface.

I don't know about social ferment but the notion that our memories and ideas about the 1950s are, for the lack of a better word, colored by the fact that the images of those years are mostly in black and white is fascinating. Do monochromatic images really influence the way we imagine an entire era? If so, wouldn't we think of, say, the 1920s in the same way? Perhaps we do. If the majority of images from the 1950s were shot in full color would that really change the way we think about those years? Would they seem more exciting? More accessible? Do black and white pictures ever brim with immediacy or do they always wrench us through time and feel like records of the past? What other ideas pop into our imagination when we see black and white images?

This weekend I screened a documentary that challenged me to ask questions about two of my favorite subjects: film and history. Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) is Alain Resnais' 1955 documentary on one survivor's account of the Nazi concentration camps. I've read that the documentary isn't about history but about memory. After screening it, thinking about it, and reading some of what's been written about it (there's a lot of material out there including a book on various interpretations) I think it might be both. Below are my immediate thoughts on it...

Let's say you're a filmmaker and you're asked to make a documentary film that says something meaningful about resistance, deportation, and/or the concentration camp experience of WWII. How would you go about it? What would you present in your film? Maybe you'd fill the movie with historical facts and figures, a narrative survey of the events, charts full of statistics, maps of different locations, and the learned comments of professional historians? Once that film was completed would it make the past any more real in the minds of the viewers? Would it really be any different than a written work about the same events? Would it really have anything meaningful to say about that past? Would anyone have much use for it fifty years later?

One tends to think Alain Resnais pondered similar questions when the Comité d'Histoire de la Déportation de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (Committee on the History of Deportation of the Second World War) commissioned him to make a documentary film on the concentration camp experience as part of an exhibition on the history of the resistance, deportation and liberation in France some ten years after the end of World War II. Thankfully, Resnais, a filmmaker best known at that time for his avant-garde short films but who went on to make canonical features Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), did not make the kind of film described above. Instead, he collaborated with poet and concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol and created an unforgettable personal account of the death camp experience.

In the picture, Cayrol's narration is composed of lyrical passages, flashes, memories, feelings about his time in a Nazi camp while Resnais edits color tracking shots of concentration camp ruins juxtaposed with stark black and white archival footage of the camps in operation. He upsets traditional film language with jarring spatial and temporal dislocation, a favorite trick of avant-garde filmmakers such as Maya Deren, while Cayrol's recollections and descriptions fill our ears. The effect is not a representation of the reality of the past but the cinematic equivalent of remembering.

The documentary gives a sharply felt kick to the active viewer too. For example, a single tilt up an immense pile of human hair (see screencap above) or the shot of marks caused by the desperate clawing of fingernails in a "shower room" evoke more acutely felt horror than a thousand Clive Barker movies. At one point Cayrol surmises that these words and pictures are ultimately inadequate to represent the true horror of the concentration camp experience. We have to use our historical imagination and Resnais eases that task by evoking the experience of recollection. Tracking color shots of the present day concentration camp strike us with the immediacy of Now. When these shots are starkly juxtaposed with black and white archival films of the camp in operation we're wrenched through time. The monochromatic stock of the archival images evokes the past as a suddenly unburied memory. It isn't necessary for the narrator to say "this is Buchenwald in 1943," or whatever, we make the temporal leap unconsciously.

Incidentally, the previous uses of full color/black and white transitions in motion pictures that I recall are basically effects. For example, the color sequences in early revue musicals, the color sequence in the unmasking of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the titular painting at the end of Portrait of Jennie (1949), and The Wizard of Oz (1939) which sort-of reverses the technique used here by Resnais (black and white is Dorothy's present reality while color is reserved for her unconscious world). According to an interview on the Criterion DVD, the use of color was a conscious choice made by Resnais to produce an intended effect. It was not forced upon him by the fact that the archival footage was black and white, as some have claimed, because he could have shot new footage in b/w (in fact, I noticed that he did for a couple of the shots). It's since become such a standard and recognizable technique, especially in documentaries about the past, that I have no idea how novel it might have looked to audiences back in 1955.

Can we also view the picture as a kind of history on film? Perhaps. Motion pictures may be inadequate to truly represent the past, but through them we can better imagine places and events that we ourselves never experienced. A looong ways back on this blog, as I was reading Robert Rosenstone's book History on Film/Film on History, I asked fellow film bloggers their opinions about the difference between history on paper and history on film (thanks again for all of the thoughtful responses guys). One part of Rosenstone's theory is that history on film is a separate and distinct kind of history that has an esoteric potential for sharing something meaningful about the past in ways quite different from the written word. I felt opposed to the thesis at first. However, I feel somewhat, if grudgingly, more open to it as my knowledge of the cinema expands. After seeing Resnais' picture I'm kind of surprised that the author didn't use it as a primary example in the chapter on documentaries. The formal language does evoke the experience of remembering, but the film may function as a kind of history on film too. It unburies traces of the past and lays them bare before us as a kind of shared recollection and the imagery engages the historical imagination. Though it's been criticized for questionable historical accuracy of some of its narrative claims and for failing to more fully address causation, particularly anti-Semitism, the subjective focus reveals a kind of historical truth that drives an emotional response to events in the past. If no single film can represent the total truth of the past because traces of the past can be used to create a variety of true accounts depending upon interpretation does that make this account any less historical? Also, the documentary reveals how a filmmaker can coax images to function as a kind of history on film that has a meaningful impact that endures. The chromatic mercuriality and personal reminiscence reminds us of the sudden unexpected ways that memories can become aroused while it prods us to consider horrors of the past as something present and live--not as a potential within each of us or as a shared culpability as some critics have interpreted, but as a reality among us. Finally, if the director made an academic style documentary full of historical facts, figures, and talking heads about concentration camps would cinephiles remain interested in it all these years later?

At one point in the film we're told that the title refers to Himmler's threat that the Nazis would make anyone deemed undesirable vanish into the "night and fog," never to be seen or heard from again. Resnais' haunting documentary, which we're still discussing all these years later, helps to ensure that those who suffered this fate will not be forgotten. For realizing the unexpected potential of a performative historical documentary in the short subject format through 1955 Night and Fog is about as accomplished a film as we can hope to find.

A Star is Born (1954)
Directed by George Cukor
174 min.; U.S.A.; Color; Multi-Channel

On to 1954--and what a difference a year makes! In place of the typical squarish-rectangular frame, the black and white image, and the monophonic sound I see a full color image stretched nearly twice as wide and hear Judy Garland's musical number burst forth from multiple channels of audio. After watching fifty-odd years worth of movies in the Academy ratio these are welcome changes for me. Reading through old newspapers and magazines I discovered that these screen innovations were often advertised--and are sometimes still written about today--as brand new advances in filmmaking circa mid-1950s. In fact, these innovations really amount to gimmicks that had been under development for years. And it's ironic that I'm viewing this picture on a television because widescreen, color, multi-channel sound, and other gimmicks like 3-D pictures were parts of the studios' response to the growing popularity of television back in the 1950s. Back then the heads of the major studios worried over what they believed to be a direct correlation between the decline in motion picture attendance and the millions of television sets entering American homes. The question they asked of themselves was: how do you convince families in the suburbs to travel to downtown movie houses and pay to a see a motion picture when they can watch broadcast entertainment for free in the comfort of their own living rooms? No one seemed to have a definite answer but the studios gambled on various gimmicks to win spectators. Unfortunately nothing would reverse the box-office decline and by the end of the decade weekly theater attendance sunk to only half of what it had been at its peak back in 1946.

Before we get to this Film of the Year I just want to take a moment to mention that after half a century some still claim that TV was solely responsible for this decline in attendance. For example, just before viewing A Star is Born I watched an episode of You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story (2008), a television documentary about the history of Warner Bros., The doc is a fine survey history narrated by Clint Eastwood with lots of other famous directors and actors contributing to the discussion and it helped me get a better handle on the context in which this week's film was produced. The doc begins by talking about massive layoffs at the studios after WWII but, when it gets to the years in question it states "Doris Day was about all the studio had for good news in the early 1950s. Television had risen out of nowhere and by mid-decade had cost Hollywood half its audience, Warners half its profits, and serious people thought the movies were doomed." The doc doesn't give us any examples nor point us to sources to back up the claims. I'm easily convinced that delightful Doris Day is good news, but the rest is an oversimplification. First of all, television did not "appear out of nowhere." It was, in fact, a technology developing throughout the century and "serious people" had been discussing its potential ramifications on cinema and radio for years. By 1948 there were about a million sets in the U.S., nearly all in large urban areas like New York. In the mid-1950s the FCC worked out licensing and television stations opened up around the country and business boomed. Secondly, television wasn't solely responsible for the decline at the box office. Historians tell us that the decline in attendance was actually, like all events in history, the result of a multitude of factors. For example, American society and culture was transformed after WWII by the move of large numbers to the suburbs away from downtown movie houses; the Baby Boom brought a new focus on child-raising; increasing spending power coincided with new and more options for leisure-time of which television was but one alternative, and so on. In the early-1950s studio heads like Jack Warner may have been convinced that television was solely at fault for the decline in his business (which incidentally began back in the late 1940s), but to hear the same tired claim repeated in a brand new documentary is odd and irritating. In any case, gimmickry alone wouldn't reverse trends brought about by these changes. Back to our film...

Life reflecting art or art reflecting life? A television camera (left) and a film camera (center) capture a Hollywood premiere in this unusual shot from the opening of A Star is Born. The premiere of the motion picture received similar coverage and was broadcast on television.

I chose to view A Star is Born (1954) for this Film of the Year because its production history is a veritable checklist of technical, promotional and content gimmicks used by Warner Bros. to lure audiences into the theaters. For example, at various stages the picture was considered for WarnerScope, sterescopic (3-D) filming, non-anamorphic widescreen, Technicolor, and, finally, Fox's CinemaScope and Eastman Color. Moreover, the picture is a musical with big production numbers; it's a remake of William Wellman's classic Hollywood fable; it features the return of Judy Garland after a two-year hiatus from the screen; the studio gambled millions on it despite declining box-offices; and it was promoted with a major advertising campaign, televised sneak previews, a sound track LP tie-in, and a star-studded Hollywood premiere shown on live television (the latter is included on the DVD version and for fans of Hollywood stars of the 1950s it's almost as fascinating to watch as the movie itself).

In the film, Garland plays singer and aspiring actress Esther Blodgett who meets and marries box office star Norman Maine (James Mason). He uses his connections to help her career get started while his own career plummets due to alcoholism. Does Esther have what it takes to rise above adversity and become a true star? Director George Cukor presents us with nearly three hours of fabulous singing, dancing, and melodrama in full color CinemaScope before we find out.

A number of aesthetic opportunities for motion pictures have been attributed to widescreen formats such as CinemaScope. For example, they open up the frame and distances actors from each other and the mise en scène, presents a continuous space and suggests a connection between objects within that space, and increases the illusion of depth. One often cited benefit of working in widescreen is an increased psychological insight into characters' experience of the environment. That can be the case but it isn't necessarily exclusive to widescreen movies. Some early concerns about the format that I found in various old film reviews suggest that the expanded shape presents unexpected challenges for editing because cutting forces the eye jump around the extra-wide image to find the area of focus. As a result long takes and point-of-view or eye-line cutting were developed and challenged traditional continuity style editing.

I noticed Cukor working in the extra-wide CinemaScope frame in a number of novel ways, but the cinematic advantages of widescreen versus the old format and the differences between motion pictures and television were apparently on the mind of the producers and Cukor because these technologies appear prominently in a number of key scenes. I don't know if it's a result of Cukor experimenting with the format for the first time, or directions found in the screenplay, or dictates by studio brass (anyone out there have a production history for this picture handy?) but what I see on the screen looks like a rather self-conscious response to the aforementioned screen changes. For me, part of the fun of watching A Star is Born turned out to be noticing the various appearances of filmmaking and television technology and seeing how they're used in the story. I've noted three of my favorite instances below:

One of the most obvious comparisons of the standard Academy format with widescreen CinemaScope occurs when Esther and Norman attend a preview of her breakout picture at the Marcopia Theater. Cukor begins the sequence by showing the film as projected on the screen inside the theater. In a frame within a frame, and a motion picture within a motion picture, we see the final moments of a musical number in the Academy ratio. A few dancers can be seen around Blodgett, but they're cut off by the boundaries of the square-ish frame. She dominates the image and we can barely discern anything about the background. The open curtains on either side would likely be moved to the edges of the projected image in an actual theatrical exhibition, but here they help to reinforce the additional frame space made possible by the widescreen format.After a cutaway to Esther and Norman watching in the audience, Cukor returns to the picture-within-a-picture for an exceptional extended musical sequence that recounts a movie star's rise to fame--only this time we see it in all the widescreen glory of CinemaScope. I screencapped the musical number at nearly the same point as above to compare the two formats. CinemaScope allows Cukor to crowd the frame with colorfully costumed performers so that image projects not only Garland's energy, but that of the entire chorus and the background. The visual impact outshines that of the previous image.

Another of my favorite examples occurs when Esther receives an Oscar in a scene midway through A Star is Born. The actual Academy award ceremony was first broadcast on television in 1953 and the scene encourages us to compare television with cinema in a creative way. Take a look at the screencaps below:Notice which part of the frame draws your attention? In the scene, Esther is standing just off-center on the stage holding her newly-won award. On the left we see a television camera crew dolly-in on her while she gives an acceptance speech. On the right we see how this movement of the camera affects the image broadcasted to the nation's TV screens. At least three things are happening here: One, as the unbroken image on the right transforms from a full-shot to a medium close-up Esther's words and facial expressions seem to have an increased emotional impact (I noticed similar close-ups during the most recent Academy awards broadcast). Second, because the human eye is attracted to, among other things, movement, light, and size on the screen we're drawn to look at the televised speech on the right part of the screen instead of the long-shot of the event unfolding even though it takes up the majority of screen space--in effect, we stop watching the movie and begin watching television within the movie! But Cukor isn't finished yet because he sets up what I'd like to call a comparison shot...Aware that we're looking at the close-up of Garland on the television in the long-shot Cukor cuts away to a drunken Norman rudely interrupting Esther's speech and then cuts to a close-up of Garland in CinemaScope. In a comparison of close-ups, CinemaScope certainly comes out on top. The size, framing, light and color of the Scope shot makes us forget all about the fuzzy little black and white square that held our attention mere moments before.

Comparative home viewing choices make for an interesting background during a scene in which Norman is told that the studio is letting him go. Home viewing of motion pictures was a popular pastime among those who could afford the equipment and had the knowledge to operate it before television offered a relatively worry and work free alternative. In the top image above, Norman and Esther show a newsreel and a feature film on their impressive home theater system during a cocktail party at their oceanside mansion. In the lower image, Norman catches the film's producer sneaking off to watch a fight on Norman's tiny black and white television set in another room. Packaged newsreels like the one in the top image began to fade from screens as television news came into its own during the 1950s. Live coverage of events, such as the boxing match the producer prefers to watch over his own picture, is another advantage TV has over the movies. "Traitor," Maine says with a smile.

I mentioned above that it feels ironic to watch a picture like this on the hated television. But if 1954 is remembered as a year when gimmicks were promoted as the future of Hollywood then a far more grand irony can be found. For, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), which features rising star Marlon Brando, taut direction, and a socially relevant script but none of the aforementioned screen innovations, swept the Academy Awards and received some of the highest critical praise for that year. That must have stung the studio heads who banked on widescreen and the other expensive gimmicks. But knowing this it seems natural to ask the question, is wider better? I have to admit to being a fan of the experience of watching the wider image. In fact, I've got Rear Window (1954) and Carmen Jones (1954) in the DVD stack ready to view next. But, I'm also aware that a wider image cannot improve a bad picture any more than 3-D is likely improve something like Cat Women of the Moon (1954). Though 3-D receded to a relative rarity, widescreen and some of the other screen innovations would become parts of the eventual mechanization of "movies" as something wider than Academy ratio but less than CinemaScope, in color, with sync sound, and multichannel audio. But from an artistic standpoint it seems that the success of On the Waterfront is a reminder that better technology is no guarantee--or even necessary--for better films.

Picking up the blog were we left off in 1952, I sat down with a feature film and an animated short this week. The short was Duck Amuck (1953), one of the Merrie Melodies series directed by Warner Bros. veteran Chuck Jones. In it the irascible Daffy Duck (always preferred him to Bugs; Donald too for that matter) struggles to deliver a performance in a traditional narrative cartoon while an offscreen animator does everything he can to prevent it--including erasing the background, removing the sound, ending the film prematurely, and even erasing Daffy himself, much to the duck's distress. The avant-garde short reveals the influence (or at least an awareness) of modernism present in the UPA cartoons we looked at last time, but with a heaping helping of the zany humor so characteristic of Warner Bros. cartoons.

I've wanted to see the feature, Luis G. Berlanga's Bienvenido Mister Marshall (1953), for some time because it's considered the starting point of serious modern filmmaking in post-war, pre-democratic Spain and a classic comedy. In addition, Berlanga has been called one of the two most prominent filmmakers working in Spain during the 1950s (his friend and co-writer of the film Juan Antonio Bardem being the other). I haven't seen much Spanish cinema so this seemed like the ideal film to start my viewing in earnest. Locating a DVD proved problematic, but the recent advent of the film on VOD solved the issue.

In the picture, the residents of a remote, nearly pre-modern small town in central Spain willingly transform themselves and their town into stereotypes of traditional Andualusian Spain when they're told it will convince American representatives for the Marshall Plan (then promoting economic recovery in much of war-devastated Europe) to come to town bringing wealth and gifts for everyone. Ostensibly a spoof on Hollywood representations and American cultural influence, the movie is really a parody of musical-comedies popular in Spain (espanolada) and a satire on certain social realities under the dictatorship of Franco.

I originally planned to place the pictures in context and write from there in typical Film of the Year style (one could write reams on the multilayered Mister Marshall). However, when I viewed these two very different types of cinema back to back this week some unexpected similarities revealed themselves and I've decided to look at those instead. The most prominent similarity is that both movies make us aware of an offscreen agent directly affecting what we see and hear on the screen. The technique is used differently in each picture, but has the same effect of disrupting our typically passive viewing experience by revealing the artifice of cinema. Below I've marked out instances of this and other similarities.

Both Duck Amuck and Bienvenido Mister Marshall contain title sequences that suggest narrative setting and fuel our expectations. In Duck Amuck, a heavy serif font, pointed dagger, and yellowed parchment paper suggest late medieval or early modern Europe. Meanwhile, the country road imagery in the title sequence for Bienvenido Mister Marshall establishes a remote, contemporary, rural setting that combines with the title itself and provokes an expectation of an arrival, apparently of Mr. Marshall. Coincidentally, neither turns out to be the case: the 17th century setting of Duck Amuck proves to be a ruse and a Spanish government official, not Mr. Marshall, travels that remote road.

The fun begins straight away in both films through the obvious manipulation of the viewing experience by an unseen hand. In Duck Amuck, Daffy Duck finds himself inappropriately dressed as a sword wielding musketeer after an unseen animator erases the castle background and replaces it with a barnyard. Lucky for us Daffy can quickly switch costumes off-camera so the gag continues through a number of variations. In Bienvenido Mister Marshall, an offscreen narrator removes characters from the screen in order to better introduce us to the town and the townspeople, and comically reveal the shortcomings of both.

I noticed a marked contrast in the respective casts and levels of awareness. Duck Amuck is a one-man (one-duck?) show. Not only does the character of Daffy Duck react to the mercurial moods of the animator but he's aware of the artist's manipulation and even complains to "whoever is in charge out there" about it. He speaks directly to us when he addresses his unknown tormentor. Meanwhile, Bienvenido Mister Marshall features an ensemble cast, apparently drawn from characters found in traditional Spanish film and/or rural stereotypes. However, the characters, unlike Daffy, are completely oblivious of the narrator, his actions or his comments to them and us.

The animator and the narrator also affect the film itself in their respective pictures. Above left we see Daffy confronting himself between frames of film after the camera has been improperly operated (strange, the sound effect heard here is of a film projector not a camera). On the right, the narrator stops the action and cuts to a full shot of one character to better focus our attention on him and the package he's holding. These gags work because they disrupt our expectations that motion pictures represent an artificial world that flows in a linear fashion and doesn't tend to stop and start at the whim of an outside power.

I love mirrors on film. Not only because they imply a metaphor that we're watching a reflection of ourselves and/or our reality on the screen, but also because seeing a character react to his own image often reveals new levels of introspection. Mirrors can be great tools for comedy on film too. Three of my favorite mirror gags are all variations on the same visual joke of a character thinking he's looking at a mirror when in fact he's looking at another character disguised as himself. These are found in Seven Years Bad Luck (1921), Duck Soup (1931), and Hare Tonic (1945). In our films mirrors are used differently. In Duck Amuck the offscreen artist erases Daffy after the irascible duck yells at him and then redraws him as a grotesque quadruped replete with a screwball flag on his tail. He then renders a mirror so his creation can see himself. Of course the former duck freaks out but, as Chuck Jones once pointed out, what's really funny is how he remains the Daffy Duck character even though he's been almost completely physically transformed. The opposite occurs in Bienvenido Mister Marshall when the narrator lets us spy on some of the characters' most private moments right before they go to sleep. Here we see the town mayor imagine himself as a gunslinging hero from a Hollywood western, his favorite type of film. His appearance stays the same yet he transforms himself into a caricature of a cowboy when he thinks no one is looking.

Not only the imagery but the sounds of the pictures are controlled and manipulated for laughs. In Duck Amuck this takes the form of aural variations on the unsuitable background/costume gag mentioned above. When daffy strums a guitar we hear silence; when he tries to speak we hear inappropriate sound effects. Again he's aware of the changes and his mounting anger over his inability to control his own voice is hilarious. In Bienvenido Mister Marshall, the narrator grants us access into four of the character's dreams. The town priest has a nightmare about being given the third degree by a group of detectives in a dream-parody of Hollywood crime pictures. The dialogue is transformed into nonsense by speeding it up then slowing it down. However, unlike Daffy, the dream-character priest appears completely unaware of the ridiculous sounds issuing from his mouth as he tries to explain himself to the police.

Finally, both films climax with a surprise gag. The mischievous animator is revealed to be none other than (we guessed it, didn't we?) that rascal Bugs Bunny himself who delivers a classic punch-line. Conversely, the narrator is never revealed in Bienvenido Mister Marshall but we discover that the title of the film is a joke: the long-awaited American visitors simply race through town without stopping so no one is ever welcomed despite the townspeople's best efforts.

I find it strange and wonderful that the two films I decided to view for 1953, one animated and the other live-action, one a short and the other feature, one avant-garde humor and the other a satire on social realities, one from a Hollywood studio and the other produced in Spain, should have so many cinematic similarities. I wonder what other films from the decade feature offscreen hands breaking the illusion of realism and/or interacting with the audience, the story, and/or the characters? Was it common technique in the 1950s? Is it still around in movies these days?

Central Court — Moments after the Frankie Baker jury returned a verdict of "not guilty" in the Johnny Britt murder trial shots rang out with a "rooty toot toot" leaving defense attorney Jonathan Bailey dead. The assailant: Bailey's own client, the briefly exonerated Frankie herself. The trial started and ended swiftly today. The defendant was accused of having murdered her sweetheart, pianist Johnny Britt, with three gunshots to the back after chancing upon him and one Nellie Bly in flagrante in the backroom of the Sordid Bar.

The Sordid Bar, scene of the alleged homicide of the house musician Johnny.

Testimony by the bartender, a fellow obviously well-known to everyone in the courtroom, placed Johnny, Nellie, and Frankie at the scene of the crime. Nellie, who claims to be a singer by profession, testified that allegations of a secret liason between herself and Johnny were groundless. "I was in the backroom there with John-boy," she told the jury. "But only to rehearse." In Nellie's twist on the events, Frankie shot a terrified Johnny through a hardwood door as he attempted to hide from her unreasonable jealous rage.

Defense attorney Bailey, mentioned in some circles with the unlucky epithet "Honest Jon the Crook," delivered a fantastic defense of Frankie. Playing up to the jury in a ballet-like performance, he extolled the virtues of the "sweet and demure" defendant and suggested that it was, in fact, Johnny who attempted to shoot Frankie when she spurned his overtures of love and then took his own life. The jury took Bailey's story hook, line, and sinker. They deliberated so swiftly that they barely had time to leave the courtroom. They unanimously found the defendant innocent of the crime.

Courtroom Celebration Interrupted by Slaying

After the verdict was rendered, the courtroom unexpectedly exploded into raucous celebration; the judge, jury, and spectators reveled with glee as the state prosecutor looked on in open-mouthed disbelief. But the festivities were cut short when attorney Bailey prepared to leave the courtroom to personally celebrate his victory in the company of Nellie Bly. Seeing the couple together, Frankie suddenly leapt to her feet, grabbed the alleged murder weapon (marked "Exhibit A" and somehow still loaded), and shot him three times. Fittingly, Bailey's final words were, "I rest my case."

Bailey, moments after being shot by his own client in the courtroom.

In the aftermath of the brutal slaying, the bailiff escorted Frankie from the chamber in chains. The prosecutor was happy to see her off, no doubt certain of a conviction this time. Though Johnny's alleged homicide remains an unsolved mystery, it is Frankie's murderous act today that leaves this reporter scratching his head. Bailey's defense had set her free, and she was seen only moments earlier expressing her gratitude for his successful efforts with a big, wet kiss. Why then should she kill him?

Following the shooting, an unrepentant Frankie is led off to jail.

According to some witnesses, there were signs during the trial that the relationship between lawyer and client wasn't all business. Others put it more simply, "he was a man who done wrong." Whatever the truth, this case has all the cache of a traditional ballad re-imagined through the modern mind.

Motion Picture Rumors

Over the course of the trial, this reporter overheard frequent rumors concerning plans by the United Productions of America (UPA) to turn the trial and its scandalous conclusion into an animated film to be titled, Rooty Toot Toot (1952). Those who had the pleasure to view UPA's Ragtime Bear (1949) or the exceptional Academy Award-winning cartoon for Columbia, Gerald McBoing Boing (1951) will remember the company's unique approach to theatrical cartoons.

Gerald's parents and doctor examine him in hopes of discovering a physical cause for his unique way of expressing himself solely through sound effects in UPA's Gerald McBoing Boing.

UPA embraces modern art, cubism, fauvism, expressionism, surrealism, more mature themes and satire, original music, and offbeat content. They strive to use colors, textured patterns, and abstract backgrounds to establish mood and setting rather than paint realistic backdrops. In animation, to paraphrase one of their talents, they create drawings that move rather than draw life-like movement a la the rigid standards of the Walt Disney studio, the leading American animation studio for over two decades. With their individualistic, modern style, the UPA cartoons mark the pictorial realism and storybook cuteness of Disney and the endless slapstick gags of Warner Bros.'s Looney Tunes as belonging to the past. It seems fitting then that this up and coming company should create an animated version of the outlandish events we've seen here today. For if Disney or Bugs n' the gang should tell this tale it would be altered drastically, made accessible to children, and feature funny animal characters. No doubt plenty of "hurt gags" would be thrown in for good measure. But in UPA's thoroughly modern style this courtroom tragedy of love, betrayal, and murder can be successfully told. Ezra Pound once encouraged the modern movement to "Make it new." UPA will make it Now.